HumanoidTrainingGlossary
The words, defined once
This site sits where two vocabularies meet. Robotics people hit the fab words cold; fab people hit the model words cold. Both are here.
Robot learning
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| VLA — vision-language-action model | One neural network that takes camera frames and a written instruction and outputs the robot’s next joint positions. The dominant form of robot policy in 2026. |
| Policy | The thing a robot learns. A function from what it senses to what it does next. Replaces hand-written motion planning. |
| Teleoperation | A person driving the real robot through a real task, usually in VR or an exoskeleton, so that every second produces a matched pair of what the cameras saw and what the joints did. |
| Episode | One complete demonstration of a task, start to finish. The unit teleoperation throughput is counted in. |
| Sim-to-real gap | The drop in performance when a policy trained in a physics simulator meets real friction, real sensor noise and real lighting. |
| World model | A model that predicts what would happen next, so a policy can rehearse or be evaluated without touching the real world. |
| Cross-embodiment | Training on data from many different robot bodies so a policy transfers to one it has not seen. |
| Action head | The part of a VLA that converts understanding into a short sequence of future joint targets, usually a diffusion or flow-matching network. |
| Fail-passive gap | The safety problem unique to legged robots: cutting power, the standard safe state, makes a balancing machine fall over. |
The factory floor
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| MES — manufacturing execution system | The software that records and controls what actually happens on a plant floor: which lot went to which tool, in what state, under which recipe. The system of record for production. |
| FOUP — front-opening unified pod | The sealed plastic carrier that holds 25 silicon wafers inside a fab. Moving one is a logged transaction, not just a physical act. |
| AMHS — automated material handling system | The overhead rail and vehicle network that moves FOUPs around a fab today. The incumbent a humanoid would have to justify itself against. |
| Cleanroom class | How few airborne particles a room allows. A Class 1 room permits almost none, which is why a particle-shedding robot is a problem. |
| Sub-fab | The floor beneath the cleanroom holding pumps, chemicals and support equipment. Dirtier, less constrained, and the likely first place a humanoid works in a fab. |
| Cpk | A capability index: how comfortably a process fits inside its specification limits. Automotive buyers write a minimum Cpk into contracts. |
| SECS/GEM | The long-standing messaging standards by which a semiconductor tool and its host system talk to each other. |
| ISA-95 | The standard model for the levels between the plant floor and the business systems above it, and the usual vocabulary for where a new system fits. |
| Tote | The plastic container that logistics humanoids move. The simplest payload, and the reason warehouses were the first real deployments. |